It seems that this is a medium sort of shot as far as pain. That's why the butt.

Trouble with poison ivy is that the spots itch in hot water, so I'm going to have to take cool showers until it clears up. It's such hot weather, maybe I should go out on my patio and use the showerhead on the garden hose (my emergency shower if I'm working out there on a hot day and feel like I need to cool off fast). Would mosquito bites make me any more miserable than this ivy? Probably not. Look out, I'm getting my towel and shampoo and heading out into the yard. MOM, throw rocks at anyone who decides to invade my privacy. Thanks.

"...The astronauts gasped at the sight of Earth, a blue and white orb sparkling in the blackness of space, in contrast to the dead lunar surface in the foreground. People at home saw the full Earth only in black-and-white television images. Even so, the sight moved the poet Archibald MacLeish to write in The Times on Christmas Day:

"To see the Earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the Earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold — brothers who know now they are truly brothers."

After the mission, NASA released the color pictures the astronauts had taken of "Earthrise." These were even more inspiring and humbling, the mission's prized keepsake. Time magazine closed out the troubled year with the Earthrise photograph on its cover, with a one-word caption, "Dawn." ..."

It's been a mad hour or two at Home Woebegone, my dank den in the wall of Southern California existence. The SDG&E electrician came at 2 and tested my electric meter finding it accurate to within .2%. The fireplace man came and installed the newly purchased screen over the newly renovated fireplace. The electrician reprogrammed the meter to reflect the solar system's contribution correctly. With delight, I watched the afternoon sun drive the meter down by two kilowatt-hours before the sun sank over the hill to the West and into the great ocean beyond it.

We are still witholding the final payment to the solar company until we see a reasonable correspondence between the meter, the solar system's reported production, and our known pattern of use over the last five years. It is my fond hope these figures will correlate properly now that the variable of the meter has been eliminated.

Who's the leader of the club that's MADE for you and me? M-I-C K-E-Y MOUSE. [emphasis supplied]

Then they did roll call.

Now Amos, if you weren't there for roll call you didn't get to "made" any of them: not Annette, not Darlene, not Jimmy, nobody. If you had been you would have been paired up, most likely (in your case) with Minnie.

MOM, I'm trying to do the smart thing. I made an appointment with my doctor because I got into poison ivy over the weekend. It goes on and on and on and spreads and spreads and spreads so maybe if I get a gel or pill or shot I can knock it out? My itch tolerance isn't as high as my pain tolerance.

Well, perhaps a national Potato Transport System needs to bew funded by which Dem potatoes get discount, or mass-packed rates and get one seat per case, while Republican potatoes get one seat per spud, with extra charges for tiny seat belts of they are lean AND Republican.

Hold on just a goll-darned minute here! My potatoes were grown organically in soil which has been tested and found to be 100% free of lingering pesticides, chemical fertilizers, and Republicanism. To have Republican potatoes, you must have Republican potato growers and, since most Florida Republicans buy their potatoes from the supermarket, it follows that most home-grown potatoes are Democrats.

The only notable exception would be commercially grown potatoes. They're probably 80% Republican, but they're mostly grown in and around a little town called Spuds, which is 400 miles from where I live (though only 25 miles from where my Republican parents live).

Those Florida potatoes will be heard to protest. If the recount had encompassed the entire state, all potatoes would have been acknowledged and Gore did win. But they keep their voices down, because they feel "gore" is a first cousin to "mash" and they find that a scary concept. (They prefer pan fry with herbs and ended with a little steam with the lid on.)

I am sure that if what Rapaire says is true, and the Florida potatoes are all Republicans, that they can perfectly well afford individual seats per potato and should be billed accordingly. Also,they may be swollen up, and able to use normal seat belts, so that reduces the outlay even further and improves the shareholder's return, something all Republican potatoes can only applaud. Or would, if they had hands to applaud with.

Well, the barley for Budweiser is grown here by good Mormon farmers....

And as for FLORIDA potatoes, I'm sorry, but they are too soggy and too sunburned to be REAL potatoes. They're so laid back and all of them have hanging chads. They take their flavor from the manatee and alligator shit they live in. And they're all Republicans.

What I mean is, any reasonable airline should allow the whole box to go on one ticket, and not charge each potato separately for its own ticket. Unless they have an age policy and know the ratio between human years and potato years, so that potatoes which are more than three months old are considered the equivalent of human 12 year olds and required to get their own seat and ticket. That seems fair enough, sure, but I could only support it if they put in special potato-sized seatbelts. Even at 12 or its equivalent, you don't want those pre-teen potatoes hitting you in the back of the head in the event of an emergency stop. Especially if they happen to be small potatoes, the kind that Quayle could never spell.

I have a boxful of potatoes, but they were grown in Sycamore, Florida. Maybe we could work out some sort of potato cultural exchange program. They're new potatoes, though, so they're too young to travel alone. They'd need escorts/chaperones. You think EIFIC could fund a couple of round-trip tickets?

I'll let you in on a secret: build a one-sided tessaract and live in it. That's what I did. I live about 37 degrees off from the what everyone considers "the plane of existence" -- sort of off-bubble. Works great.